We’re extremely pleased to be able to introduce ‘Delphi: sharing assessments of cryptographic assumptions’, an advanced research initiative developed by Jeroen van de Graaf and Arjen K. Lenstra.
Almost all practical cryptographic protocols are based on computational or ad-hoc assumptions. Assessing the strengths of these assumptions is therefore a key factor in evaluating the risks of the systems using them. Discussions around these assumptions are often limited to taking place during coffee breaks of major crypto-conferences, or confined to isolated groups. Our goal is to make these discussions explicit and public, gathering the knowledge of hundreds of experts.
To this end we developed **Delphi**, an online questionnaire to document researchers' opinions and beliefs about the strengths of the most important assumptions. All responses received will be made accessible on our website, and we also intend to consolidate these responses and publish the results.
The current paper addresses classical cryptographic assumptions, whereas Delphi 2, a separate questionnaire dedicated to Ethereum, zkSNARKs, zk-friendly hash functions, and similar primitives, is currently under development. Since many of these primitives are relatively new and haven't been subject to the test of time, this joint effort to compare primitives should be of great help to our community.
The paper is published on the Cryptology ePrint Archive: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/157
Jeroen van de Graaf is Senior Cryptographer at ZKM and Associate Professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
